Through Broadway's Near Now Fellowship, Adham is focusing on ideas of immersive viewing and how performing bodies can engage with and be augmented by animated digital objects.

I’ve devised a selection of films and accompanying events that undermine the idea of the human body as a singular entity, exploding the idea of the body as a discreet biological category. Sometimes literally.

In the last few years I’ve been excited by the idea that human bodies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender, can be denaturalized, that ideas of the natural can be debunked and through this action, social hierarchies can be decoded and misaligned.

Octopus, a Radical Faerie and medical anthropologist, introduced me to ideas of the microbiome, a collection of bacteria in the human gut recently recognized as an organ. Extending outward, Octopus described the body as a ‘holobiont’, “a diverse ecology comprising thousands of different cells and microbes in a state of co-evolution, entangled with our environment performing in unison as a biological matrix”.

This marked a shift in how I conceive of my body, and built directly on my readings of author Octavia Butler and her third gender Ooloi; their tender tentacles penetrating, tasting and healing their lovers. This image excited an interest in ideas of a queer porous body, or more explicitly the idea that all bodies are more porous than I’d previously imagined, guiding me to realign queer experiences of physicality and intimacy, often conflated with concerns around disease and morality, with something more holistic, even nourishing.

The films I have selected to be screened as part of Porous Bodies present a variety of often problematic approaches to the body, exploring perspectives that reframe the body as a plastic process, porous and adaptable, denaturalized, magic, science-fictive and miraculous.

Date TBC, Broadway

Katsuhiro Otomo's landmark cyberpunk classic obliterated the boundaries of Japanese animation and forced the world to look into the future.

Neo-Tokyo, 2019. The city is being rebuilt post World War III when two high school drop outs, Kaneda and Tetsuo stumble across a secret government project to develop a new weapon – telekinetic humans. After Tetsuo is captured by the military and experimented on, he gains psychic abilities and learns about the existence of the project’s most powerful subject, Akira. Both dangerous and destructive, Kaneda must take it upon himself to stop both Tetsuo and Akira before things get out of control and the city is destroyed once again.

Tuesday 27 August, 8:00PM, Broadway

Friday 27 September, 7:00PM, Chaos Magic/Backlit

Monday 7 October, 8:30PM, Broadway

Thursday 31 October, 7:30PM, Broadway

Banner image by Adham Faramawy.